The Golden State: Where & How to Live, Secure, Visit, Enjoy and Thrive in California

Turning Night Into Day

So it is incandescent carbon that is doing the work. But carbon can be heated white hot without fire, by means of an electric current, for instance. That's what the inventor of the first electric lamp did, used an electric current in place of fire.

A Flameless Lamp

If you had told a man living a hundred years ago that sometime a lamp would be invented that would give light without fire, he would have thought it absolutely impossible. Yet even at that time the first experiments for obtaining electric light were being carried on in laboratories. As now, perhaps, somewhere in the quiet of a laboratory, an as-yet-unknown inventor is working away on some wonderful discovery that we don't even dream of.

The first flameless lamp was invented by an English chemist, Sir Humphrey Davy. It was not an easy thing for him to work on this in those days when so little was known about the electric current and so few knew even that little. There was no such thing as a machine for producing electricity, and no one had ever thought of such a thing as a power station. The current was produced only in scientific laboratories by the aid of batteries composed of galvanic cells.

Don't be frightened by this high sounding name. You have undoubtedly seen batteries in a pocket flash-light or in a box in the hall near the electric door bell.

I shall not take the time to explain in detail the construction of this battery. The important thing is that the electric current is produced in the cell and goes from it along a wire to the lamp in the flash-light or to the bell. It then returns to the cell along another wire. The cell is like a pump. Just as a pump sends water along the pipes so the cell sends the electric current along the wire. The terminal through which the current passes out of the cell into the wire is called the positive pole and is designated by the sign +, the one by which the current returns to the cell is called the negative pole and is designated by the sign.

To get a strong current several such electric pumps are united together into a battery of electric (or galvanic, which means the same thing) cells.

That's all there is to it.

Humphrey Davy once made the following experiment: he took two little rods of coal and fastened one of them to the positive and one to the negative wire. When he brought the ends of these roads close together the current jumped over the intervening space from one to the, other. The ends of the rods were heated white hot and between them appeared an arc of bluish flame.